New Ghostcrawler Blog: The Role of the Role

LFR Roll Clarifications

Blizzard Entertainment

Dungeons & Raids

Players no longer benefit from a role-based need bonus on the second of multiple copies of the same item on a single Raid Finder boss kill. For example, a player who chooses Need on two set piece tokens or two weapons (and wins the first) will only automatically roll 1-100 for the second from that particular boss.

Dev Watercooler: The Role of the Role

Ghostcrawler

The DelugeA monsoon is coming. We will soon inundate you with Mists of Pandaria information, starting with the upcoming media event and everything that follows. It’s going to be a very exciting time for World of Warcraft, and we are all super impatient for it to happen.

But… we’re not quite there yet. I want to make that clear upfront, because this blog isn’t directly Mists of Pandaria related. You won’t find any announcements here, just a philosophical discussion that you may or may not find interesting. If you’re looking for thrilling announcements, you know what I’m going to say: Soon™.

Multiple DPS RolesI said this blog isn’t directly relevant though, because I want to discuss a topic that we did struggle with a lot during Mists development, and indeed through most of World of Warcraft. We have classes with multiple DPS specs, and for mage, warlock, hunter, rogue, warrior and death knight, there isn’t even a melee vs. ranged distinction between those DPS specs. The question comes up all the time: “what is the role of these roles?” I don’t think there is a right answer here, and we’ve even changed the design a few times over the last several years. Again, I’m not couching this in terms of an imminent announcement or anything. This is fundamentally one of those designs that could go in a lot of different directions. It’s something we discuss a lot, and we figured given the strong opinions of our forum-posting community, many of you probably do as well.

A paladin can choose from among specs that let her be a tank, melee DPS or healer, and can shift around which role she fills in a raid or BG team from week to week. Through the Dual Spec feature, she can even do so within a single evening. If her group doesn’t need another healer, or if she needs a break from tanking, she can become a DPS spec fairly easily without having to swap to a different character. A warlock doesn’t have that luxury. Yet, the warlock still has three specs. Is the idea, then, that you are supposed to swap from Destruction to Demonology and back depending on the situation? Is the idea that you play Affliction if you like dots and Destruction if you like nukes? Or do you just switch to whatever theoretically does 1% more DPS for the next fight?

Players are sometimes cavalier about throwing around the claim that there’s a “lack of design direction” when they want their character buffed. Of course, classes always have a design direction; players just sometimes disagree with it. My point is that just because we debate whether the current design is the best possible one doesn’t mean there isn’t a design at all. That distinction is important. And of course, we do have a directive for which DPS spec you should play: whichever one you enjoy the most. But that doesn’t mean that is the best model or that it can’t ever change. There are other models we could try.Model One – Everyone is equal all the time

If your DPS and utility are the same across specs, then you just play whichever one you prefer. Maybe you like the kit of the Frost mage, or maybe you like the rotation of the Fury warrior, so you play them. As I said above, this has been the model we have used for a while now, with mixed success. The challenge is that “all the time” caveat. We can get all of the DPS specs pretty close together on target dummies, and indeed they actually are very close on target dummies today. Our encounters aren’t target dummies though. Having some adds increases the damage of dot-specs. Having lots of adds increases the damage of strong AE specs. Having to move on a fight, and how often and far you have to move, can cause DPS to go up or down differently. Even if DPS is only off by a few percentage points, many players will respec to the one with the highest DPS (even if it’s theoretical, even if for them they will do lower personal DPS than if they had stuck with a more familiar spec). A mage who just loves Fire might be frustrated if he ever has to go Arcane, while another player might be happy that he gets to try different specs for different fights.

The class stacking we’ve seen on the Spine of Deathwing encounter relates to the need for massive burst damage in a specific window, such that the difference between a one minute DPS cooldown and a two minute DPS cooldown matters. Even if we could make sure every spec had the same AE vs. single target damage, do we now need to also ensure every spec can do the same DPS in burst windows of various lengths? Is that even mathematically possible? Or do we just test every spec for every raid encounter of the current tier and tweak class mechanics around for whatever is the current status quo? That implies a high rate of change, and I wonder if we’d lose a little bit of the fun of experimentation and theorycrafting if it was basically accepted that you could take any spec to any fight and do about the same damage. It’s more balanced, yes, but does it lack depth or flavor? Is it fun?Model Two – Everyone has specialties and you match the spec to the situationUnder this model, we would establish spec specialties. For example, Arcane could be good for single-target fights while Fire is great at AE fights. Some of that design already exists in the game, but we try not to overdo it. If you really like playing one mage spec, or really detest constant spec swapping, then this model isn’t going to be to your liking. Furthermore, we don’t want to overstrain our boss design by having to meet a certain quota of AE vs. single target fights and movement vs. stationary fights and burn phase vs. longevity fights or whatever. It is also really hard to engineer these situations in Arenas or Battlegrounds (for example, both mobility and burst are extremely desirable in PvP), so in those scenarios there still may just be one acceptable spec.Model Three – You swap specs to gain specific utilityIf we used this model, then you might switch out to a different spec to gain a specific spell. Again, we have some of this today. A DK might want Unholy’s Anti-Magic Zone for a certain fight. Hunters might go Beastmaster to pick up a missing raid buff. Mages might go Fire for situations where Combustion shines. Druids might go Balance when they need the knockback from Typhoon. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way though. As in Model One, not every player wants to have to swap specs. If you just like Survival, you might resent having to go BM to just to buff someone. If knockbacks are too potent, then it really constrains your raid composition and makes even casual guilds feel like they need to keep a stable of alts or benched players for every fight. If, for example, there wasn’t a boss in the current raid tier for which warrior abilities really shine, then warriors start to feel like a third wheel, yet trying to make sure every boss in a tier has a moment for every spec to shine is a pretty daunting task.

The extreme case of this is the “utility” spec who does middling DPS, but brings a lot of synergy and utility that improves all of the other specs. This was the Burning Crusade model, where classes like shaman and Shadow priests were brought to raids just to make the pure classes (and warriors, who were always treated as pure classes back then for some reason) do better DPS. In Lich King, we changed the design to make different raid buffs and abilities more widespread and give groups much more flexibility in their raid (and to some extent dungeon) comps. We heard from Shadow priests that they wanted to do competitive damage, not just be there to make everyone else more awesome. But even today we get a lot of requests to improve the utility of someone’s spec so that they are more likely to get invited to a group.Model Four – There is just a best spec for PvP and PvEThis was the model of vanilla World of Warcraft, and we understand some players wouldn’t mind it returning. In this model Arms and Frost and Subtlety (and other specs) were designed to be good for PvP, while others, Fury and Fire and Combat perhaps, were designed to be good for PvE. The PvP specs might have better mobility or survivability or burst damage, while the PvE specs have better sustained damage over the course of a 6-10 minute boss fight. A lot has changed since vanilla. We don’t make many raid or dungeon encounters these days where DPS specs can just stand in one place and burn down a boss. Mobility, survivability, and burst damage can all be really useful on particular encounters, sometimes trumping the higher DPS offered by a competing spec. (There’s that old adage that dead do zero DPS.) In addition, if there is a PvP spec and a PvE spec, then for pure classes that implies that your third spec lacks much of a role. (The good leveling spec? Is that exciting?) Furthermore, our Mists of Pandaria talent tree design explicitly takes away some of the tools from the traditional PvP specs and makes them available to other specs in the class. If this works out, then you can take your Frost mage raiding, or have an Arcane mage for PvP who uses some of what traditionally were Frost’s control and escape tools. That’s great if you PvP and love Arcane, or PvE and love Frost. It’s less cool if you were the kind of player who was totally comfortable with the simpler (and possibly easier to balance) design of having dedicated PvP vs. PvE specs.

Model Five – Don’t have multiple DPS rolesThis is the most controversial model and the one that would require the most change, meaning we are almost certainly never going to do it. For sake of completeness though, you can argue that classes never should have been designed with multiple specs that fill the same role. In this model, either Arms or Fury goes away and gets replaced with something. (Archery? Healing?) Warlocks and other pure classes would need a massive redo to end up with say a melee and tanking warlock. Everyone becomes a hybrid. The hardest decisions becomes whether you want to be the ranged or melee DPS version of your class (like druids or shaman). This idea is elegant from a design perspective because it un-asks all of those questions about how much more damage pure classes should do than hybrids to justify their narrower utility. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, elegant designs often aren’t the strongest ones (I could write a whole blog on that topic alone). Model Five is the kind of rhetorical question you could go back in time and ask before WoW launched, but not the kind of thing we could change today without taking an enormous amount of effort, to say nothing of the irate players who would feel bamboozled that we were so dramatically changing their character out from under them. I try to never say never, but this model isn’t the kind of change you make in a mature game. It’s here only for completeness and because I suspect some of you will bring it up.

But Which is the Best Model?Hell if I know! I fundamentally believe that none of these models is, without question, the obvious right one. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, and there are probably other models you could come up with that are variants on these five, or perhaps even something new. Like I said, we’re not announcing a philosophy change yet. If we get enough feedback for one model or another, we might eventually change our minds. Also for this blog we’re going to lock the comments and ask that you post your replies in this forum thread. Just remember that even we don’t believe that there is one correct answer, so please keep that in mind when you’re composing your feedback.

Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft and holds the world record Wild Strike crit… at least until beta starts.

Comments

Comment by ffcloud2000

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:14:22 -0600

I think it would be cool if the Pure deeps classes could have one of their specs go Tankish.. At the same time people might loose their favorite spec so it would be a difficult change for people. But we could always use more tanks.

Comment by Ucknot

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:57:48 -0600

dps on most pve content places but love to be healer in pvp ! lol doenst have to be nothing else to it ;)

Comment by Zulixs

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:32:00 -0600

No matter what the role model, there is a major fault in reality. Toon too much depends on gear. Once you decide a role on a toon, you need tons of year for farming it. It does not simple as switch between within few second. And it never be accepted by other partner either raid or dungeon wearing inappropriate gear. Like we heard "that tank wearing dps gear", or "that tank wearing green for dun or raid is unacceptable".

Furthermore, skill is another problem, but gear dominating almost all in WoW nowaday. No matter how you change it, it still provoke a lot of players. We come here to play the content, but not to relearn the class. Content and the variety way to play are much benefit to player.

Comment by Puritysdisciple

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:09:29 -0600

If I had to put in my $0.02, I would lean very hard toward the last option. While, yes it is hard to do in a game as mature as WoW, it is not unthinkable. For the pure classes I can easily come up with spec changes that could change their roles:

Death KnightChange unholy to be a ranged damage spec. This could be done fairly easily by simply giving them a ranged dump for their blood / unholy runes. Maybe something like:

This would leave the death knight with a ranged, melee, and tank spec.

DruidNo Changes needed

HunterConvert survival over to a melee DPS spec. This would make them much closer to what they were in Vanilla with Mongoose Bite and Raptor Strike being their highest damage, as well as allowing the use of melee traps for very high damage. Should not be a major change.

Convert beast mastery to a tanking spec. This would dramatically buff the survivability of your pet, and give the hunter the utility needed to control the flow of combat with their pet (much shorter cooldown on distracting shot and misdirect, etc). This wouldn't be much of a change either as long as the DPS output of the hunter is nerfed to the point of a tank.

MageConvert fire to be a melee DPS class. Make blast wave once again be surrounded on the caster, along with Dragon's Breath would be a few already existing melee abilities. This could be furthered by adding something like a "Flame Strike" that would be an instant attack dealing large amounts of fire damage. Even Hot Streak could stay, allowing for a proc based Pyroblast similar to a Retribution Paladin's Exorcism.

Convert Arcane over to being a tank spec. This would bring them closer in line to other tanks already with the already existing Arcane Explosion forcing them into melee for AoE pulls, Prismatic Cloak giving them damage reduction, and the ability to deal decent damage to hold threat. Their mastery could even stay similar, making them take less damage the higher their mana is. This would make them a very interesting tank to play, as they would need to balance threat and survivability.

PaladinNo change.

PriestDiscipline changes to a Tank spec. Lots of reflective damage for generating threat. High self healing capability. Smite / Archangel for dealing damage, Holy Nova for AE threat. This would be a very easy change, and would only require some form of mana regen from damage taken, and a very large buff to Inner Fire when this spec is selected. Avoidance would be an issue without Cloth tanking gear, but that could easily be added.

RogueMake combat be a Tank Spec, utilizing heavy Dodge and Perry, as well as the currently existing Combat Readiness, Evasion, and Cloak of Shadows. Again, this wouldn't be too much of a stretch, and would be interesting to see. They would also continue to share lots of gear with Druids, so no gear would need to be added.

Assassination could change to be a ranged DPS which utilizes thrown weapons to deal massive amounts of poison damage. Deadly Throw would be the primary finisher, and Fan of Knives already exists for AoE damage. The already planned Vengeful Strike would do very well here as a spec skill.

ShamanNo Change

WarlockDemonology changes to be a melee tank spec. They would utilize their pets as a soaker for damage (Soul Link) as well as Demon Form as their primary "form" (read: Druid's Bear Form). Demon form is already very good at melee range, with immolation aura, lots of armor, and demon leap giving mobility. Hellfire and Shadow Flame, give a decent toolkit for holding AoE threat. The only thing missing is a decent "spam spell" like "Demon Claw" or something similar that would deal shadow damage as an instant attack. The tank warlock would share gear with the tank mage, and priest.

WarriorFury changes to combat medic. The combat medic would use offensive attacks to generate rage, and then could unleash that rage to heal members of their party. Not only would this add another manaless healer to compete with the monk, it would also be a very interesting class to play as you would need to deal enough damage to generate the rage needed to heal (think DPS smite priest).

Spec specific spells / buffs could include:

Reduce the cooldown of Enraged Regeneration by X, and splits the healing between the Y closest party / raid members.

Your melee attacks have an X% chance to allow a Victory Rush.

Victory Rush will heal an additional target within X yards of your target.

ConclusionWhile yes, I understand the difficulty in doing this, it would also fix many of the balance issues, and create a very diverse group setup for nearly every raid. I would be very interested in seeing this in the game.

Comment by Dorelyn

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:03:06 -0600

I enjoy posts like this. Thank you.

Comment by cybermonkey79

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:02:40 -0600

I understand spreading the unique buffs out to more people. It was nice when shaman were the only class with bloodlust/heroism, but with the direction going towards 10 man raids and the increasing number of classes, it becomes increasingly difficult to have "one of everything" because we have too many options. Of course that makes a shaman less unique and specifically desireable. They do have a wider variety of specs than a mage so they are still beneficial, but you get my drift. There's good and bad. Each class needs a specific reason to be beneficial without making any so necessary that one is more beneficial than the other. With mages having time warp, we no longer have as much of a problem with "oh crud, no shammy? No hero?" (Which is funny given that alliance didn't have that until BC anyway so you can see how spoiled they've gotten). Honestly the same argument that he makes cross-class for dps can be made cross-class for healing and tanking. It used to be hard to aoe tank as a warrior. I've baffled new players with stories of tanking huge pulls in shattered halls. If you had a warrior tank you insisted on 2 CC classes and you marked every target. Obviously that's not an issue now, but are the class/spec combos too similar to be individually valued? In a 25 man (heck, a 40 man) you just didn't have that issue. You had enough space to include one of almost everything. The issue is being exacerbated by the 10 man trend. I raided in BC for a while as an arms warrior for the raid buff. DPS was high enough tp make it worthwhile, but the buff wasn't so necessary as to screw a raid if you didn't have it. It was nice to have the option for variety. So you can aruge that vanilla had the best makeup, but maybe it was only the best for vanilla. I'd like to see a better mix, but to drop back to the extreme in vanilla wouldn't work in the game as it stands today.

as to whether every class should be a hybrid, as someone who plays a hybrid class I know sometimes you only want to dps which is why you pick a mage or a rogue. You don't want to be in the raid and have the RL say "we need you to heal this fight." Some people suck at tanking and healing and should stick to a pure dps class. I'm also totally fine with losing a bit of my own dps in favor of a raid wide buff because I'm intelligent enough to understand that meters don't represent the whole story. Unfortunately there's a lot of idiots raiding right now that are so busy drooling over their own number that they don't stop to think about raid mechanics that they wipe raids and call everyone else a noob for having lower numbers....but that will always be a problem no matter what blizzard does so its not something worth working mechanics around (raid finder, anyone?)

Comment by Astygia

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:09:43 -0600

Last option is cool to daydream about, but in practice it wouldn't work as well as one would think, for several reasons.

Look at Aion, a game that is all about the role-free final option. I played it quite a while beside WoW, still knock around with it occasionally. Any class can tank most of the encounters because the game's PvE mechanics are downright primitive compared to WoW, and they have to be in order to allow this variance within 'the trinity' of tank/heal/dps. Crit immunity is not a staple to tanking (or even possible) but it doesn't matter because 1shots do not occur in most content. Resurrections can happen in combat, and non-casters can rez each other using store-bought items.

There are a few encounters where single target damage is brutal, heavy, and frequent; in these case you bring a Templar (a class that has terrible sustained dps capability but can be set up to take like no damage, PvE Templar is only good for tanking ). If there are lots of adds or AoE threat is a clutch issue, you bring a Gladiator (high dps class that basically needs only to swap out dual swords for a polearm in order to become a tank and use AoE). If neither of these situations are present (and they usually are not), any class is capable of tanking. My cleric occasionally tanks, heals, and dps'es at the same time on some content. There's very little fire to not stand in, and most of the reactionary measures in a given encounter boil down to facing the boss away from the party and occasionally running out of an AoE. This is a boss fight from Aion, pretty solid example of one of the most complicated fights in role-less PvE...which it really isn't complicated at all (tank is a templar to make it even snoozier).

There's a lot more subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the PvE flow but to cut the wall of text, what it amounts to is group content design itself being far less intuitive and fun in order to keep this role flexibility possible. It has to be, otherwise it wouldn't work. And once the novelty of tanking with a rogue or warlock wore off, we would be unhappy with very boring and generic content.

Comment by kickthecat

on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:27:20 -0600

Ghostcrawler should have played older raids and see whats it like to tank stuff as older classes (Warlocks for various 'spell damage' stuff and hunters for High King Maulgar). Then he would have a better picture instead of sprouting this text

Let not forget the age old art of kiting for UBRS which is like, a requirement for hunters back in vanilla to be accepted to raiding

Comment by TalithaErrantes

on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:19:00 -0600

while I would love the fifth option (but I prefer if assassination remains the melee talents) we all know some of the classes would be very difficult and painful to give three specs without too many changes that won't like everybody.

the hardest thing about balancing everything is that we don't just go to raids or dungeons. we also play solo when outside dungeons. for me priests should be a pure healing class, warriors a pure tank class, rogues pure melee class and mages pure distance dps class. the rest are more or less hybrids (the druid being the most evident of them closely followed by paladin)

this would work wonders... the more versatile the class is the worse performance it has on each role (so a warrior would be the best tank, a priest the best healer, a rogue the best melee, a druid the most versatile and so on)

BUT this has a big problem when soloing. the pure classes would find themselves having a very hard time. the most extreme case being a pure healer. without high enough dps fights become eternal and going solo to level becomes a pain in the ass. but if we give the pure healer and pure tank high enough dps then we need to compensate giving the rest of classes even higher dps and they could even become able to 1 hit kill some mobs making pulls on a dungeon almost worthless. "look... there's a pull there. mage could you please AoE them? nice. one pull less" (sorry. I'm being too extreme just for fun)

sure balancing everything is not easy. we have pvp, dungeons, raids, solo missions, hybrid classes, pure classes, melee specs, tank specs, healer specs, caster specs, ... and we all know there's no way to have everybody like any change that on the player's personal opinion is a nerf of his favorite spec or a buff of other specs.

it's part of the human nature. I want to be the all powerful wizard of oz while the others are mere mortals so I'm always chosen to do anything I want be it raids, dungeons, pvp or help others do a regular world mission.

and we can easily see this. each time blizzard changes a few "core" skills or talents to nerf them because they were too powerful we complain that now our class will be useless and each time blizzard gives a small buff to other classes/talents because they were doing too poorly we complain that now they will be unbeatable. or just look at what people ask from the new talent system for MoP "I wish I could pick two talents from the same tier instead of having to pick one of each since I totally need to pick X and Y to be useful but they are on the same tier" the real meaning of that is "I need those two talents to be a complete unbeatable player but blizzard is being mean and wants others be able to defeat me"

I sure hope someday they will find that ideal way of balancing everything. until that day all I can do is work as hard as I can with whatever skills/talents I have and complain like everybody else that my class/spec is nerfed each time they change anything. of course I know that's false but I have the right to be a brat like everybody else.

by the way since I play on a pve server one of the stupid things I through once was "why don't they simply alter the abilities so they work differently on pvp places than on pve? I'm a rogue that only plays pve but they nerf me because pvp rogues are too powerful. that's not fair" the problem would be pvp servers where you need a mix of pvp/pve almost always.

now if you reached here (you have a lot more patience than me) I'm sorry for the wall of text. I didn't want it either but things rarely go the way we want.

Comment by sudsea

on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:15:19 -0600

If he'd take a real world POV, he find that having specs that provide "non-mobile artillery" are quite useful in a boss battle (Even the Marines don't go without their Artillery) yet they have dumbed down certain specs simply because they have made a majority of the fights mobile fights. This was probably so they can claim that the spec remains as it was originally designed and they haven't touched it. There are all kinds of ways to reduce the DPS of any spec without touching the spec itself. Granted a sit and shoot is not my idea of a FUN boss fight but the encounters in Cata go over-board on mobility and adds as opposed to a balance between mobility and burn. So much so that certain specs have been made completely useless and unnecessary and other specs made absolutely critical. And this does not take into account the duplicating of buffs such as Mark of the Wild and Blessing of Kings. So much so, again, that it is not far fetched an idea that a 10 man raid could consist of nothing beyond a Healer, a DK and eight Mages. Gearing is another fiasco. This item level stat reads like a mechanic's manual. If you don't have the internationally agreed upon item level, you don't fit. Most PvE players tend to lean toward Stacking their primary stat, mimicking as much as possible what PvP gear does naturally. Mages, Druid casters, ect. . . stack as much Intell on their gear now as they can squeeze in and still get the minimum haste, crit or whatever to deemed necessary to enhance mastery. Not much different than what PvP gear is really. The avoidance of PvE gear vs the crit factor of PvP gear is a matter of debate really. Does avoidance naturally proc more often than receiving critical strike? If you could withstand the base hit of the boss and that boss be unable to land a crit on you which ( in say a case where a boss hit you for 50K normally and could crit you for 100K) would otherwise kill you, would that not make some PvP gear desirable especially since the base stat for the class is already stacked on the PvP gear and some type of mastery enhancer could be gemmed or enchanted? Taking a FUN game (which everybody wants to do when they are not at work or school) and turning it into a game of mathematical theory ( which NOBODY wants to do when they are not at work or school) really makes it seem undesirable. I liked classic WoW, I hated BC and avoid that place even today if I can, I simply loved WotLK, hate Cataclysm, love, hate, love, hate so if the pattern goes as it has been going I suppose I'll love Mists. BTW for you guys thinking that SW:TOR might be a game that could compete with WoW. . . well they have their own class spec and game design problems and are currently facing the same player criticism.

Comment by TalithaErrantes

on Sat, 11 Feb 2012 03:38:23 -0600

So much so, again, that it is not far fetched an idea that a 10 man raid could consist of nothing beyond a Healer, a DK and eight Mages.

I once made fun with my wife and her brother about a raid group that consisted of 25 paladins (since they can be tank/heal/melee and we all know they are a bit overpowered)

would that not make some PvP gear desirable especially since the base stat for the class is already stacked on the PvP gear and some type of mastery enhancer could be gemmed or enchanted?

I have seen it. even on tanks going full pvp gear on a dungeon. ok. I can understand a melee or a caster. even a healer if I stretch it a bit. but a pvp tank on a pve realm? there's something seriously wrong if that works.

Taking a FUN game (which everybody wants to do when they are not at work or school) and turning it into a game of mathematical theory ( which NOBODY wants to do when they are not at work or school) really makes it seem undesirable.

extra points because 99% of the players don't bother doing the maths themselves and just google for it. and it's more or less justified because the raid leader will complain if they don't use the gear/enchants/gems/reforge/... that is considered optimal (even if for that player the optimal configuration is another because his style of play)

Comment by Aavri

on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:10:03 -0600

Model Five – Don’t have multiple DPS roles

Surprisingly, I think this model wouldn't be too bad, but I feel some significant downsizing would have to occur (or give every class multiple roles) in order to fit this model into the current climate of class design. I can't say much more than that because the implications are dangerous and incredible at the same time.

(God...I hope this actually made sense)

I actually agree in that I like model 5, or at least a small variation of it. I don't mind arms or fury, frost or unholy, affection, or destroy since the play styles are totally different from each other. I do wish however, that every class had in some way, shape, or form, at least one tank OR heal spec. That would give every class the ability to fill at least two roles.

Comment by Darkerdesign

on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:14:53 -0600

Model Five – Don’t have multiple DPS roles

Surprisingly, I think this model wouldn't be too bad, but I feel some significant downsizing would have to occur (or give every class multiple roles) in order to fit this model into the current climate of class design. I can't say much more than that because the implications are dangerous and incredible at the same time.

(God...I hope this actually made sense)

I actually agree in that I like model 5, or at least a small variation of it. I don't mind arms or fury, frost or unholy, affection, or destroy since the play styles are totally different from each other. I do wish however, that every class had in some way, shape, or form, at least one tank OR heal spec. That would give every class the ability to fill at least two roles.

and then you'd have tons of DPS that suddenly got a tank or heal spec that they'd never use.

Why? Because the devs have spent the better part of the past 7 years trying to prolong content by nerfing tanks and healers to the floor. Most people play as DPS because tanking and healing are miserable experiences that just aren't fun. I have *4* toons that can tank or heal (Pally, DK, Shaman, Druid). Total time spent in a tank or heal spec combined on all 4 toons: under 2 hours.

More tank and heal specs won't matter until the devs get the idea of "we don't know what else to do, so we're going to clobber tanks and/or healers again" out of their skulls.

Comment by Interest

on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:38:21 -0600

Model Five – Don’t have multiple DPS roles

Surprisingly, I think this model wouldn't be too bad, but I feel some significant downsizing would have to occur (or give every class multiple roles) in order to fit this model into the current climate of class design. I can't say much more than that because the implications are dangerous and incredible at the same time.

(God...I hope this actually made sense)

I actually agree in that I like model 5, or at least a small variation of it. I don't mind arms or fury, frost or unholy, affection, or destroy since the play styles are totally different from each other. I do wish however, that every class had in some way, shape, or form, at least one tank OR heal spec. That would give every class the ability to fill at least two roles.

That's what I was thinking too. But there's really a couple issues:

1. That would mean a lot, and I mean a LOT of work for Blizzard. I'm not necessarily implying they're lazy, but overhauling so many classes at once in such a dramatic way is actually beyond what an expansion pre-patch accomplishes. Pre-patches DO overhaul classes, but there simply isn't precedence that can imply a mass altercation of talent trees and roles.

2. Overhauled design philosophy that is quite a bit different from the current one. I can't begin to outline how much it alters the design philosophy the developers already set down. It would also affect many systems in place that compensate for lack of roles, etc. (Probably an over exaggeration, but it is worth noting).

PaladinNo change.

Okay. To be honest, I really think Paladins need an AoE Holy Power finisher. =)

Comment by YJMark

on Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:01:31 -0600

and then you'd have tons of DPS that suddenly got a tank or heal spec that they'd never use.

This is a valid point. There are many people out there that don't want to tank or heal. When playing a hybrid, many folks end up getting pressured by their guild to fill those roles if the guild is short. So having some pure DPS classes is great for those people since they can not get pressured into roles they do not want to play.

Personally, I think Blizz is taking a step in the right direction with the upcoming tank changes. Where you don't really have to worry about threat (probably one of the biggest reasons people don't like to tank - fear of losing aggro and getting yelled at by others because of it), and you focus more on active mitigation.

Comment by shanbojan

on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:40:57 -0600

I would love to have that mount, I think that it is perhaps one of the most impressive looking mounts in the game.

Comment by moocow

on Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:57:34 -0600

Don't remove or re-role the current trees. Add more specs! They've already set the precedent with 4-spec Druids. Let's add melee Hunter, tank Rogue and whatnot.

But don't change the current trees. They have different flavor. Maybe to number crunchers they're just dps, but they have different graphics, sounds, theme, feel. I don't care about minor imbalances, but I do care about having those flavors. Perfect balance is impossible anyway - don't remove the good things because you can't do the impossible.